UCL SSF
11th May 2016
Speech Representation, Learning and Plasticity:
Insights from Multi-Modal Imaging
Daniel Carey (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Speech articulation is a highly complex process involving the co-ordination of
multiple vocal tract effectors, on rapid timescales. While much work has addressed
the acoustic consequences of speech, and their neural bases, comparably little work
has charted the neural representation of speech articulations themselves. Moreover,
understanding of the physical vocal tract dynamics that are essential to speech
production remains limited, with a paucity of data related to articulatory learning
following the acquisition of non-native speech sounds. In this talk, we present a novel
framework for the investigation of plasticity of speech articulation and its
representation in the brain, using a combination of articulatory training, real-time
vocal tract MRI, and functional MRI. We show that novel articulatory behaviour can
be learned, as indexed by acoustic metrics and vocal tract dynamics. Moreover, we
demonstrate for the first time that multivariate analysis techniques allow us to
integrate vocal tract imaging and fMRI, to probe the representational basis of vocal
tract behaviour during sensorimotor transformation and articulation of speech.